08.02.12
ALANA KIRK GILLHAM
IT’S SO pliant to spend time with your baby without properly engaging. Hanging them on your hip while stimulating the cheese sauce doesn’t really count as trait time, I’m afraid.
Often I can spend an entire morning answering incidental questions, brushing hair, doing the washing and preparing provisions before I realise I haven’t actually stopped to take a moment to interact with them.
But analysis (and common sense) tells us that apart from feeding and caring for our babies, playing with them is the most significant thing you can do as a parent.
Not just because it’s fun for them, and a return to childhood for you; it is only through misbehave and engaged communication that babies and young toddlers learn the imperative lessons of life, as Einstein confirmed when he said, “Sport is the highest form of research.”
Babies and toddlers learn more in their first three years than in any other at intervals of their lives, and the skills they develop – spacial awareness, cognitive proficiency, socialisation, fine and gross motor skills, visual settlement, cause and effect, and listening and language – form the building blocks for the lie down of their lives.
Source: Irish Times